


love of mine

by The_Eclectic_Bookworm



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M, late s2/early s3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 22:09:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15958544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Eclectic_Bookworm/pseuds/The_Eclectic_Bookworm
Summary: Giles grieves.





	love of mine

Here is what strikes Giles about her absence: the prolonged silences in the library, when he is alone, on nights where she would have been with him. Even during those awful, painful times when they had refused to speak to one another (it had never been quite mutual, either time, but the space she needed he understood, and the space he demanded she did not contest), the silences had felt—impermanent. Like waiting. Her return had always felt inevitable; someone woven so deeply and so dearly into his heart could not possibly be gone forever. She would always be with him. He had been sure of it.

Here is what strikes Giles about her absence: that he cannot call it anything but an absence, though it is truly something much more final than that. He can say _she was,_ he can say _she had been,_ but he cannot say _she will never be._ He cannot say _she will never be in my arms again._ He calls it _her absence_ because it sounds, then, as though she is present somewhere else, smiling and happy and bright. He calls it _her absence_ because he cannot imagine the woman he loves as anything but vivid, moving, laughing, loving, everything about her passion and motion. She touched him and made him feel alive. She touched him and made him _Rupert,_ for a few blissful seconds on a Saturday afternoon, and he was too much of an idiot to understand that his loving her would lead to—

Here is the unfinished sentence, the memory that persists, burned into his eyelids, swimming in front of him every time he blinks: a body, still and cold, on his bed.


End file.
